Back Deck Fisheye Star Trails

2013.01.15

Day One Hundred and Seven Part II. After playing with the camera inside, I set up my tripod and shot star trails off the back deck with my shiny new Fisheye lens. I ended up learning a lot while (attempting to) process the images from this sequence. First and foremost: A good set of images for a star trails image and a good set of images for a time-lapse video are (in general) NOT the same set of images. Image sequences for star trails can actually have too many stars in them, such that the final composition is must a mess. In stark contrast, good sequences for time-lapses should be pushed to show literally as much as possible. It is when pushing the images to make the video that even slight errors in your technical procedure will become painfully apparent, as you'll see in the video in this post. While it is true that you can set white balance in post, it is absolutely not true that setting the white balance on images taken with different white balances to the same white balance will produce images with the same tonal characteristics. Correcting this deficiency in post (at the time of this posting) is effectively impossible. Lesson: set your white balance to a specific kelvin and ramp it in post if needed, but under no circumstances is it okay to use auto-white balance for a time-lapse. Once you start pushing the images even a little, you'll get extremely noticeable flickering. But yes, that is the Milky Way :)